Few modern
authors have been so aware as Joyce was of the importance of criticism for the
reception of
his later and more difficult novels. (Lernout 21) Joyce carefully read almost
all the major studies that were published on Ulysses, corrected them
and advised his critics. He drew up two schemes of the novel's structure and
sent one to Herbert Gorman and the other to Carlo Linati. Joyce talked about
the book's themes and Homeric references with Valery Larbaud and other critics
and he supervised the writing of Gorman's biography and Stuart Gilbert's
James Joyce's "Ulysses". That the author was also very conscious about the
value of his novel is evidenced by this quote from a letter to his aunt
Josephine (Mrs. Murray). When it turned out that the latter did not seem to
take much interest in the signed first edition of Ulysses that Joyce
had sent her, he called her to account:

I presented
it [=Ulysses] to you seven months ago but I never heard anything more
about it beyond a few words acknowledging receipt and an allusion in your last
letter. The market price of the book now in London is £40 and copies signed
are worth more. I mention this because Alice [Mrs. Murray's daughter] told me
you had lent it (or given?) and people in Dublin have a way of not returning
books. In a few years copies of the first edition will probably be worth £100
each, so book expert say, and hence my remark. This of course has nothing to
do with the contents of the book which it seems you have not read. [...] There
is a difference between a present of a pound of chops and a present of a book
like Ulysses. You can acknowledge receipt of the present of a pound of
chops by simply nodding gratefully, supposing, that is, that you have your
mouth full of as much of the chops as it will conveniently hold, but you
cannot do so with a large book on account of the difficulty of fitting it into
the mouth. (LI 190; 23 Oct. 1922)

So, thanks to
the help of the author himself Ulysses has revealed a lot of its
secrets.

Things are
different for Joyce's last work Finnegans Wake. When the book finally
appeared on May 4th, 1939, after sixteen years of composition,
critics who were not familiar with the publication of early parts in booklets
and periodicals like transition and Criterion were amazed at the
book's complexity. Many of them were disappointed in Joyce's skills and called
the novel illegible. When the author suddenly died some twenty months later,
it looked as if Finnegans Wake was doomed to be a book of the dark
forever and could "look forward only to an undusted career as a piece of
literary curiosa." (Campbell and Robinson 7)Still the same
critics had a premonition about the Wake being the artistic climax of
Joyce's poetics, the ultimate goal he had consciously or unconsciously aimed
at since he had started his literary career with his very first attempt at
poetry in Chamber Music.

Since many
Ulysses readers who feel ready to tackle Finnegans Wake are unable
to rely on any explanations of its author, the question of how to read the
Wake often comes up. This is where genetic literary studies may be
helpful. Although it would be pretentious to assert that genetic criticism is
able to decipher all the secrets of Joyce's magnum opus, I believe that the
genetic way is the most appropriate method to deal with the maze of meanings
and explore the richness of the Wake in a scientifically sound manner.
Before I illustrate what I mean by this, I need to sketch a brief outline of
what research has been done in Finnegans Wake notebook studies so far.

In his
article The "Finnegans Wake" notebooks and radical philology, Geert
Lernout pleads for a radical philology in notebook studies and claims that
what happens before and outside of every semio-linguistic communication
belongs to the domain of things we cannot speak of. Therefore, a radical
philology limits the inquiry to the originaldesire-to-say of any form of writing and
to its participation in a saturable and constraining context (Lernout 1995,
47).Lernout is aware of the unpopularity of this approach, though,
and adds that very few academics can afford to invest a couple of years' work
in a project that may only yield a twenty-page article.

The
consequence of this radical philology is that genetic studies themselves play
a more significant role than genetic criticism. Jed Deppman
explores one aspect of genetic studies in his article "Hallow'd Chronickles
and Exploytes of King Rodericke O' Conor from Joyce's earliest drafts to the
end of causal historie". He claims that one may distinguish between a
practical and a theoretical geneticism. The former seeks to uncover the source
material for notebook entries, or to demonstrate that certain notebook
material has been incorporated into the Wake. Theoretical geneticism is
an attempt to give another dimension to the finished literary text by
interrogating the documents that make up the work in progress. It aims to
evaluate in theoretical terms both the components and the composition of the
evolving text. (Deppman 180) Although a practical and theoretical geneticism
are complementary, my research covers the field of practical geneticism.

As Geert
Lernout pointed out, a radical philology of the notebooks is time consuming,
but the result is worthwhile. The number of scholars that studied the
Finnegans Wake notebooks is not large. The pioneer was David Hayman. He
used manuscript and notebook material in his study on the relationship between
Joyce and Stéphane Mallarmé in 1956 and in 1963 he published A First Draft
Version of "Finnegans Wake", which contains the first drafts of every
section of the Wake. Finn Fordham discerns three stages in Joyce
manuscript studies so far (Fordham 173).The first stage begins
with the publication of A First Draft Version. The most important works
that belong to this stage are Fred Higginson's Anna Livia Plurabelle: The
Making of a Chapter, Thomas Conolly's James Joyce's Scribbledehobble
and A. Walton Litz's The Art of James Joyce.

The second
stage starts with the publication of the James Joyce Archive, the
complete facsimile edition of the manuscripts, which finishes with the
discomfort of travelling up and down between the British Library, where most
of the drafts are, and Buffalo in New York, where the notebooks are kept. The
great merit of the editors is that they brought together, organized and dated
all the manuscripts.

The Brepols
publication of the edition by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout,
according to Fordham, of three of the forty-nine notebooks marks the third
stage in Joyce manuscript studies, according to Fordham(Fordham
173).The editors not only transcribe Joyce's notes, but also
annotate them as completely as possible and quote from the sources Joyce used,
insofar as they were able to trace them. Furthermore, they provide all
references to the place of the entries in the drafts, the Archive and
the Wake itself. All of this is illustrated by means of facsimile
copies of the corresponding notebook pages, some even in colour on the last
pages. So far, nine of these notebooks have been published and the editors
intend to finish the complete set within ten years. In his review of these
editions, Fordham hints at the merits of an electronic edition of the
notebooks in the near future, which could lead to a fourth stage in manuscript
studies: "The Brepols edition inadvertently introduces the utopian ideal of a
digitized version of the notebooks that is integrated with the drafts. Perhaps
this could be a fourth landmark of manuscript research." (Fordham 175)

Although this
edition seems utopian, I intend to contribute to this fourth landmark with an
electronic timeline of the notebooks. This timeline is an attempt to chart the
genesis of Finnegans Wake chronologically. By selecting the relevant
passages in the letters and the sources Joyce took his notes from, and
connecting them to the corresponding notes in the notebooks on the one hand,
and the drafts on the other, it should be possible to date these documents
more precisely and if necessary to adapt the dating in the prefaces of the
Archive.

The most
important aspect of the timeline is the 'key-date', or the date that modifies
the structure of the timeline. It is the date on which Joyce took a note or a
cluster of notes in his notebook. The editors of "The Finnegans Wake
notebooks at Buffalo" divide Joyce's notebook entries editorially into units.
A unit may be defined as a word, a line, part of a line or several consecutive
lines that are construed to constitute a distinct and discrete item of meaning
(Deane, Ferrer, Lernout: A Reader's Guide to the Edition 4). All units
from one cluster (i.e. notes taken from the same source in one sitting) have
the same key-date. In order to determine this key-date, I try to approach the
date of note-taking as closely as possible. Different factors play a part in
this decision. First of all you have the time period in which Joyce used the
notebook. Several critics, such as Peter Spielberg, Roland McHugh, Michael
Groden, Hans Walter Gabler, A. Walton Litz, Danis Rose and others have already
tried to determine the exact period of notetaking. On average, Joyce took
notes in one notebook for about four or five months. For instance, the period
of notetaking of VI.B.3, as Hayman suggests in the preface of the Archive,
runs from March to August 1923. Rose is not certain about August as the final
date and suggests July (Rose 1995, 25).We can be quite certain
about the starting date of VI.B.3 being the beginning of March. On March 11,
Joyce announced to Miss Weaver that he had drafted the first sketch of his new
work the day before:

"Yesterday I
wrote two pages – the first I have ever written since the final Yes of
Ulysses. Having found a pen with some difficulty I copied them out in a large
handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them." (SL 296)

Here Joyce
refers to the "Roderick O' Conor" sketch, for which he used the notes on early
Irish history on the first pages of VI.B.3. If we may assume that Joyce took
these notes shortly before drafting the first pages of the "Roderick O'Conor"
sketch, the starting date could even be March 10. The key-date for the first
notes of VI.B.3 will therefore be situated somewhere in early March.

An example
illustrates that a more precise dating is not as straightforward as it seems.
In fact, finding
an absolute date for a note or a cluster of notes is very rare. Three
important aspects can help us date the notes: the identified sources, the
drafts and Joyce's letters. These items
will therefore be the main constituents of the timeline.

A. The
Identified Sources

Tracing the
sources of the notes is of the utmost importance, since in many cases a source
provides the only absolute evidence for the date on which Joyce took a
specific note. An important source for VI.B.3, traced by Vincent Deane, is J.M.
Flood's Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars, a book that was published in
1917. On page 12 of VI.B.3 Joyce stops noting down Flood material when he
reaches page 118. He now takes notes from other sources. Pages 19 to 27
contain Flood notes again (from 43 to 72 in Flood). After excerpting from
Flood this second time, he stops again and takes notes from other sources
until page 89 of VI.B.3. Here he takes excerpts from Flood a third time, but
from the first page onward. He goes on noting chronologically now, until page
96 of VI.B.3, which contains notes from page 103 in Flood. One cancelled note
from the first cluster of Flood notes made it into the first draft of
"Roderick O'Conor", dated March 10 ("hospitable" on VI.B.3.004[c]), which
indicates that the note must have been in the notebook before this date. None
of the notes from the second and third Flood clusters have made it to the
earliest "Roderick O'Conor" draft, which suggests that Joyce took them later
on.

All these
facts indicate how Joyce took notes in VI.B.3. He started writing on page 1
and continued chronologically. He then put Flood aside and took notes from a
different source. Probably he hadn't written down enough information from
Flood the first time, so he opened the book a second time and started noting a
second series of notes. Having finished, he takes excerpts from different
sources and finally decides that he needs Flood for a third time, starting
again from the beginning (the first page of Flood's book). The gap between the
second and the third series of Flood notes may be due to the fact that Joyce
had to quit taking notes because of a severe eye-attack that he suffered from
mid-March. In Joyce's biography, we read that he had an attack of
conjunctivitis in March (Ellmann 543). The next two weeks he was not able to
read or write. On March 28, Joyce writes to Miss Weaver: "In spite of my eye
attack I got on with another passage by using a charcoil pencil (fusain) which
broke every three minutes and a large sheet of paper. I have now covered
various large sheets in a handwriting resembling that of the late Napoleon
Bonaparte when irritated by reverses."(LIII 73)

These large
sheets of paper cannot be notebook pages. The latter were rather small, most
of them about 8 x 5 inches. The sheets he refers to are the first draft of the
'Tristan and Isolde' episode, which is lost (Hayman, preface of JJA
II.4). From another letter to Miss Weaver dated March 18, which is quoted in
the introduction of the new edition of VI.B.3 by Deane, Ferrer and Lernout, we
know that Joyce had not given up working on his book during the two weeks
after his eye-attack. He dictated letters to Nora and to his son Giorgio, who
was not very good at spelling: "I spent several sleepless nights partly in
fier and partly wrighting which I dictated the next morning. The page you (?)
histories will be of course yous with the manuscript when and if ever
completed. The passage is towards the end of the book, but only the brieff
draft written without nots." (British Library Add. MS 57347, fols. 76-81,
quoted in "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo", VI.B.3)

Since VI.B.3
only has Joyce's handwriting, it is safe to assume, that neither Joyce nor
anybody else used the notebook between mid March and March 28. Also, the
handwriting in VI.B.3 is fairly neat, and certainly not "resembling that of
the late Napoleon Bonaparte when irritated by reverses". Furthermore, it is
unlikely that Joyce took notes the weeks after his eye-attack, since he also
had some serious dental operations. From April 4 onward the dentist extracted
seventeen teeth, the last one on April 26 (Ellmann 543). According to Ellmann,
Joyce could only read and write again on June 10. Joyce's eye-troubles may
have started just after he had taken the notes from other sources than Flood
(just before the third series of Flood notes). When he was better, he took
excerpts from Flood again. Because of his health troubles, it is unlikely that
Joyce wrote down this third series of Flood notes before mid-June 1923, when
he and his family left for Bognor. Possibly Joyce took the Flood book on his
trip. The fact that he wrote down Flood entries three times, means that in
this case we don't need one, but three key-dates for the timeline. The first
cluster of Flood notes was taken down in early March, the second shortly
afterwards, while the key-date of the third cluster is much later, toward the
end of June.

Joyce usually
preferred to maintain the normal order of his notebooks. Only when he lacked
space, he used the blank space between older notes and filled it up with new
notes, sometimes also moving backwards through the pages, as in VI.B.3, where
he adds parts of Ireland and the Making of Britain in the opposite
direction (p.19-164).

The main
problem of the timeline will be the fact that a lot of notebook material
cannot be dated. For a vast amount of notes, sources are not traced yet, or
cannot be traced. The absence of a source makes the dating process even more
complicated. If we cannot identify the source of a note or a cluster of notes,
we miss one of the most significant parts of the puzzle that we need to
reconstruct the key-date.

B The
Drafts

Not only the
source of a note, but also the date Joyce introduced it in the drafts may be a
criterion to reconstruct the key date. First of all, the drafts are useful to
date the notebooks more precisely, as in the case of the first series of Flood
notes that are used in the "Roderick O'Conor" sketch (see above). Secondly,
the draft reference indicates the date ante quem, or the terminus ad quem, of
a certain unit in a notebook. Very often, though, the drafts do not provide
evidence that is relevant to the dating of the notebooks. Some unidentified
notes can be dated by means of the drafts, but in most cases, the best I can
do is using the date ad quem as the key-date. However, this date cannot be
related to the date of note-taking, since Joyce usually transferred the
notebook material to the drafts at random. He flipped through his notebooks,
back and forth, and used all suitable materials in the drafts. Once this was
integrated in a new typescript, he would repeat the process. Sometimes ten
years of time could pass between the time he took a note in a notebook and its
use in a draft. For instance, the Flood note in VI.B.3.019(c) "Book of Life /
Irish Thebaid" was integrated in II.2 in 1934.

C Joyce's
Letters

A last source
of helpful information to reconstructthe key-date of the notes is the whole of Joyce's
letters. Some letters reveal the exact date on which Joyce writes down a note
in his notebook. On 8 November 1922Joyce answered a letter of Harriet Weaver in which
she wrote that she feared that her house was being watched by a plain clothes
policeman. (The police rightly suspected her from smuggling forbidden books
into England). Joyce replied: "That solitary detective is an interesting
figure. Is he what the English call a King Beaver, that is an Irish
constabularyman with red whiskers, riding a red bicycle?" (LIII, 193)

On
VI.B.10.001(r) Joyce wrote down: "King Beaver redwhiskered / policeman on a /
green bicycle". The source for this note is a reader's response to an article
in the Irish Times (October 20 1922), called "Beaveritis" which
attacked a game that had become popular in England. It was the game of Beaver,
which was played by two people using a scoring system borrowed from tennis.
The player who first cried "Beaver!" as soon as a bearded person appeared,
scored. The article in the Irish Times reads: "One need neither howl
nor shout nor in any way offend the feelings of those who flaunt face-fungus
in the form of either a "Walrus" or a "Beaver" [...] a "Royal Beaver" is a man
afflicted with a full outfit of face-fittings – to wit, beard and moustache –
while a "King Beaver" is a red-whiskered policeman riding a green bicycle." (Irish
Times, 20 Oct. 1922)

In this case,
we can reconstruct the date of notetaking very precisely. The key-date will be
8 November 1922, the day on which Joyce wrote his letter to Harriet Weaver. Of
course this kind of evidence for one single note is highly exceptional. In
order to date notes based on newspaper articles for which this kind of
evidence does not exist, I will have to use a system of relative dating. The
Irish newspapers Joyce used had to be sent to Paris by boat. They reached him
only a few days later. If we take into account some possible delays due to bad
weather, we will have to provide a margin of at least a week. Since we have no
real evidence for this date, I choose not to use it. It is certain, though,
that Joyce couldn't have read The Irish Times of December 23 before its
date of publication (= date a quo). Therefore, all the notes taken from
newspapers will get the date a quo as a key date.

In some
exceptional cases this way of relative dating for newspaper articles does not
work. In VI.B.6,
Joyce uses material from old newspapers. The period of note taking of this
notebook is the end of December 1923 to the end of February 1924. He suddenly
notes parts of articles from the Irish Independent dated February 13,
1923. This is no reason enough to redate the notebook. Geert Lernout already
pointed out that Joyce had taken some old issues of newspapers on his stay in
the winter of 1922 in the South of Franceof which he found
evidence in a letter (Geert Lernout 1995, 39).Joyce could have
read the old Irish Independent issues some ten months later.

Although the
letters are a helpful tool in my research, the information they provide is not
always relevant to the dating of the notebooks. A good example of a close call
is this sentence in a letter dated 23 October 1923: "A friend of his [=Mr
Quinn] told me that there is a club in the far East where Chinese ladies (not
American as I supposed) meet twice a week to discuss my mistresspiece.
Needless to say the club is in – shavole Shanghai!" (LI 206)

Joyce used
the words "shavole Shanghai" (FW 398.28), but apparently skipped the
notebook-phase and immediately introduced it in the drafts (47481-4 'savole
hang shanghai', which he changed into 'savohohole shanghai' on 47481-5).
As a consequence, I could not insert the entry, nor the date in the timeline.

The fact that
I can only include the notes that were traced in an identified source may be a
restriction of my project. It is obvious, though, that studying the chronology
of both notebooks and manuscripts may help us date the Wake's pre-texts
more precisely. As Geert Lernout mentioned before, it is only when we refer to
the notebooks and the drafts that we can decide with some degree of
probability which parts of the world went into the book and which parts
probably did not (Lernout 1995, 45). In both cases, it is important to know
when they did(n't) in order to reconstruct the "contextual memory"
(Ferrer, 233).